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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Religion
Religion ChatGPT Plugins were a small topical grouping inside the ChatGPT plugin catalogue that gathered third-party extensions for scripture lookup, hadith retrieval, prayer scheduling, and faith community information. The grouping never had a formal tab in the official plugin store, but third-party directories such as plugin.surf, whatplugin.ai, and scriptbyai.com routinely sorted these plugins together. The plugins beta operated by OpenAI ran from March 23, 2023 until April 9, 2024, when the framework was sunset in favor of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.[1][2][3]
Religion plugins let ChatGPT query scripture indexes and faith-community databases during the conversation. A user could describe a topic in everyday language, and the plugin returned matching verses, hadith, prayer times, or center listings from the developer's data store. The category was tiny, with seven verifiable plugins captured in third-party catalogues during the live era, but it covered three of the world's largest traditions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) and was the first time that scripture search was widely available inside a general-purpose conversational interface.[3][4][5]
This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable through the original plugin interface. Several developers later released equivalent functionality as Custom GPTs or features inside their own consumer products.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023 with twelve launch partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus first-party plugins for web browsing and code execution.[1] None of the launch partners were religion services. Access opened in alpha to a small number of Plus subscribers. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI began rolling plugins out to all Plus subscribers, expanding the active catalogue to roughly seventy plugins.[6]
Religion plugins arrived in the weeks immediately after the broad rollout. Chabad Centers, billed as the first Jewish plugin for ChatGPT, was published on June 16, 2023.[5] Chat with Bible, Chat with Quran, and Hadith Advice all went live on June 20, 2023.[7][8][9] Prayer Times appeared on July 3, 2023, the Bible plugin by Praison on July 7, 2023, and Sahih AI on August 1, 2023.[10][11][12]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plugins with twelve launch partners; no religion services included.[1] |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI begins rolling plugins out to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers.[6] |
| June 16, 2023 | Chabad Centers plugin announced as the first Jewish plugin for ChatGPT.[5] |
| June 20, 2023 | Chat with Bible, Chat with Quran, and Hadith Advice added to the catalogue.[7][8][9] |
| July 3, 2023 | Prayer Times plugin added.[10] |
| July 7, 2023 | Bible plugin by Praison added.[11] |
| August 1, 2023 | Sahih AI hadith retrieval plugin added.[12] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces GPTs, the successor framework.[2] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.[13] |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes; new plugin-backed conversations end.[3] |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stop working; full shutdown.[3] |
Throughout the live period, the religion grouping was informal. OpenAI surfaced plugins through a Popular, New, and All sort, supplemented by curated lists. The same plugin could surface under "Religion," "Lifestyle," or "Miscellaneous" depending on third-party catalogue conventions. For an overview of how plugins were grouped during the live era, see chatgpt plugin categories.
The underlying large language model behind the plugin platform in 2023, principally GPT-4, had two practical limitations for scripture work. While the model had read religious text during pretraining, its citations were often paraphrased rather than verbatim, and it sometimes produced verses that did not exist. The model could not call out to authoritative scripture databases, hadith collections, or community directories on its own. Religion plugins addressed both problems by fetching live data from a curated source using the standard plugin architecture: a manifest at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json plus an OpenAPI specification.
Typical patterns:
A single chat session could host up to three plugins at once, which encouraged combinations such as a scripture plugin plus a web-browsing tool. The search experience was natively conversational, so a user could refine a query iteratively. This was an early production application of prompt engineering techniques native to the chat surface.
None of the launched religion plugins generated original sermons, fatwas, halakhic rulings, or theological judgments inside the plugin response. They returned source text and metadata. Reviewers framed the plugins as study aids rather than substitutes for a clergy member, scholar, or teacher.[14][15]
The table below lists plugins with verifiable launch information that were widely covered as religion tools during the plugin era. Plugins that could not be confirmed through at least two credible sources are omitted. All ceased operating on April 9, 2024.
| Plugin | Developer | Tradition | Added | Function |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chabad Centers | Reshape Creative | Judaism (Chabad) | June 16, 2023 | Center directory and event lookup, built on the Chabad.org Centers API.[5] |
| Chat with Bible | Brentably | Christianity | June 20, 2023 | Semantic search of the King James Version of the Bible.[7] |
| Chat with Quran | Brentably | Islam | June 20, 2023 | Semantic search of the Quran.[8] |
| Hadith Advice | Munir Fardeem | Islam | June 20, 2023 | Semantic search across six hadith collections.[9] |
| Prayer Times | Haseeb Mir | Islam | July 3, 2023 | Daily prayer times by city, address, or IP.[10] |
| Bible | Praison | Christianity | July 7, 2023 | Verse interpretations and related-verse retrieval.[11] |
| Sahih AI | Muhammed Aldulaimi | Islam | August 1, 2023 | Hadith retrieval from the six sahih collections.[12] |
The Chabad Centers plugin was developed by Reshape Creative, a digital agency that builds tools for Chabad representatives (shluchim). It was announced on June 16, 2023 in the Chabad-affiliated outlet Anash.org as the first Jewish ChatGPT plugin. It exposed six endpoints: listAllCenters, listCenterTypes, getCenterInfo, searchCenters, getCentersByZipCode, and getChabadCenterEvents. The data layer was the official Chabad.org Centers API, the same backend that powered the Chabad.org website. Users could ask in plain language for the closest center to a city or zip code, retrieve operating details, or list upcoming events at a chosen center.[5][16]
Chat with Bible and Chat with Quran were built by the same independent developer, Brentably, and shared a common backend on the religions.chat domain. Both went live on June 20, 2023. Chat with Bible exposed three actions: semantic search across the King James Version, verse lookup by book, chapter, and verse, and chapter lookup by book and chapter. Chat with Quran exposed three equivalent actions: search with a configurable result count, getVerse taking sura and verse, and getSection taking sura and section. Neither required authentication. OpenAPI specs were hosted at bible.religions.chat and quran.religions.chat.[7][8]
Hadith Advice, by independent developer Munir Fardeem, was added on June 20, 2023. It was trained on roughly forty thousand hadith from the six canonical sunni collections (Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, Sunan al-Nasa'i, Sunan Ibn Majah, and the Muwatta of Imam Malik) and used a semantic search index. Its single endpoint, getHadiths, accepted a topic and returned a configurable number of results (default three) with text and source citation. After community feedback, Fardeem later took the plugin offline and consulted with scholars about improvements, but the original remained in the catalogue until the platform-wide shutdown.[9][17]
The Prayer Times plugin, by developer Haseeb Mir, was added on July 3, 2023. It returned daily Islamic prayer times for any location: Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha. The plugin exposed three endpoints: getTimings for IP-based lookup by date, getTimingsByAddress for address lookup by date, and getTimingsByCity for city lookup. The manifest was hosted on Vercel.[10]
The Bible plugin, by developer Praison, was added on July 7, 2023, on a separate backend from Chat with Bible. Its defining endpoint, relatedverses, retrieved related verses for a given verse with each result containing verse text and reference. The plugin used OAuth2 for authentication and was hosted at bible.praison.ai. In a head-to-head review published by Tithely on August 30, 2023, the Bible plugin produced better overall results than Chat with Bible on doctrinal queries (tithing, the afterlife, baptism, and the Trinity); the reviewer noted that the Bible plugin combined direct citations with theological context while Chat with Bible focused on verse retrieval.[11][14]
Sahih AI, by developer Muhammed Aldulaimi, was added on August 1, 2023. It returned authentic hadith from the six sahih collections, with output including the original Arabic, an English translation, and a source citation. A single endpoint, queryHadith, accepted a topic and returned matching hadith. The implementation used a vector database of hadith embeddings on a Quart server with the LangChain framework handling index queries. The OpenAPI specification was hosted at sahih.cc.[12][18]
Religion was a search-and-reference category. Several adjacent functions were absent or sparse during the live era:
| Adjacent function | Status during the plugin era |
|---|---|
| Sermon writing or homily generation | Not represented |
| Pastoral counseling | Not represented |
| Catholic-specific scripture or magisterial documents | Not represented (Magisterium AI launched later as a standalone product) |
| Hindu scripture (Bhagavad Gita, Vedas, Upanishads) | Not represented (GitaGPT and similar Hindu chatbots existed as standalone web apps) |
| Buddhist scripture (Suttas, Pali Canon) | Not represented |
| Christian denominational tools (Mormon, Orthodox, Methodist) | Not represented |
| General church finder | Not represented (Chabad Centers covered Chabad-Lubavitch only) |
| Tarot, astrology, runes, I Ching | Sometimes grouped with religion in third-party directories, but properly belong to a separate spirituality and divination category |
The gap reflected the early state of the platform rather than a deliberate restriction. OpenAI's plugin review favored low-risk informational endpoints and discouraged plugins that produced original judgments on contested topics. The Hindu religious chatbot ecosystem of early 2023, exemplified by multiple GitaGPT projects launched in January and February 2023, lived on independent websites that called the OpenAI API directly rather than through the plugin system.[19]
Religion plugins drew light coverage from general technology press and heavier coverage from religious media. The Chabad Centers launch was reported in Anash.org as an example of how Chabad-Lubavitch outreach could use AI tooling.[5] Tithely's August 30, 2023 review compared the Bible plugin and Chat with Bible head to head, concluding that the Bible plugin produced more comprehensive results on doctrinal questions while noting that neither replaced sound theology or pastoral wisdom.[14] Coverage of the hadith plugins was concentrated in developer write-ups, including a Medium post by Sahih AI's developer on the plugin's technical design.[18]
Usage of the broader plugin platform remained concentrated among power users. OpenAI later cited this as a primary reason for replacing plugins with Custom GPTs, arguing that the install flow was too involved for typical Plus subscribers.[2] No public usage figures were released for any individual religion plugin.
Commentators in the faith-based AI press during the second half of 2023 noted three recurring issues. The model occasionally restated paraphrased text as direct quotation even when a plugin was attached, so users had to verify citations against the raw output. Plugins worked only with the specific scripture edition or hadith collection the developer had indexed, so users seeking comparison across translations had to switch plugins. The three-plugin-per-chat limit constrained workflows that required scripture, commentary, and a web-browsing tool at once.[14][15]
Plugins were superseded by GPTs, announced at OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, with the GPT Store opening on January 10, 2024.[2][13] GPTs let any Plus subscriber bundle custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions (the GPT-equivalent of plugin endpoints) into a shareable assistant. New plugin installations stopped on March 19, 2024 and existing plugin conversations stopped working on April 9, 2024.[3]
Religion-plugin developers responded in one of two ways. Some republished their work as Custom GPTs wrapping the same backend. Others turned to standalone faith-tech products outside the OpenAI plugin system. Magisterium AI, a Catholic-specific assistant trained on the magisterium of the Catholic Church, was launched in this second wave by the independent vendor Longbeard, and is not a ChatGPT plugin or a GPT.[20] By 2025 and 2026, the GPT Store contained dozens of religion-themed GPTs, including BibleGPT, HinduGPT, SheikhGPT, the Quran Companion, and Hadith-GPT.
The religion category showed that scripture lookup was a natural fit for a conversational interface and that small independent developers could ship usable scripture and prayer tools. It also illustrated the limits of the early plugin model: the install flow was opaque to most users, the per-chat plugin cap constrained study workflows, and the plugin store provided no usage analytics. Each constraint informed the design of the GPT framework that replaced it.